Happiness Reduces Reported Satisfaction with Life

We tested whether influencing participants' affective states using videos would change their reported SWL in a representative sample of US adults (N=788). Those for whom the video improved affect reported 5.9% lower SWL compared to nonresponders (p=.008). This result was driven by young adults, women, individuals with high trait empathy as well as those with low agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. These drivers were confirmed by quantifying feature importance using extreme gradient boosting. Estimating a mediation model of the change in affect on SWL showed these results continued to hold when controlling for personality traits and income. Our analyses show the importance of measuring and removing the influence of current affective states when measuring SWL